so I must finally start my "book" about a sickly old eurasian artist dying alone in the rural midwest of france...
I guess there should be some kind of bio/intro/history so that would probably break down into a kind of down and out in london and paris experience in the period when helldotcom was part of my worldview etc...
and then just zap into the various themes and obsessions of an utterly rejected artist with nothing for company but an internet connection and a steady stream of cluster flies etc...
a bit of intellectual theorizing and druggy fantasy stuff weaving in and out of a reality that is a total non-event...
so anyway the prehell thing was kinda bleak...
RépondreSupprimerI was a rich baby born in hong kong so my first memories were of being a lonely infant playing at some kind of shadow boxing fantasy or other usually in relation to whatever I'd been into on tv...
which on one level is as good as it gets but my father was an alcoholic and my mom was kinda nuts too in a glam psychotic kinda way...
and although I was spoilt I think being an only child meant I was probably always a bit lonely and wimpy and susceptible to suffering by being sensitive or not to what was going on around me...
in art terms I guess the tv thing and comics were a big influence as I'm sure they must have been for my generation and those that have followed...
so I don't think I want to dwell on hong kong much as I don't remember much anymore but I will hopefully remember to make some asides if and when as the plot unfolds...
if my story gets made into a movie some infant footage in hong kong would be cool because I was up in a luxury flat with big windows and a verandah overlooking the harbour...
RépondreSupprimerthe place was close to the governor's park and a trolley car line running to the peak...
gazillionaire real estate these days I'd guess and back then the apartment had a luxury side and a concrete side for the live-in servants...
so yeah there could be cool cinematic images of a rich brat infant in a rich colonial hong kong...
but we didn't do home movies so the scenes would need to be constructed somehow...
at enormous expense just for a few brief flashbacks...
encore svp
RépondreSupprimerso I just thought of a fetish thing...
RépondreSupprimeronce upon a time when I was at artschool I lost this little bone dove that marie gave me and I obsessed trying to find it but I didn't and it did seem to have consequences like things went wronger...
what I first thought of though was an inflatable dragonball that I picked up in lalaland...
I had it in paris and then it disappeared and I can't remember if I gave it away or packed it and lost it...
but anyway the idea is that it triggered the decline or at least was a parallel signifier somehow...
these triggers don't need objects though...
when monkey came around to make some calls and I made a random mix with the pictures it kinda felt like an "end"...
and losing email exchanges have felt that way too...
weird vibes of relational resonances...
and that strange "mechanism" whereby some things seem significant or gain value and the twilight zone of the occult etc...
but I am already losing the plot... hahaha
RépondreSupprimerI mean the story is simple enough as it's just a bitter tale of how it doesn't help in life to be a rootless artist...
and thus the story is an indictment of the human condition generally...
but I guess what might make it interesting is the interesting bits... hahaha
the bits that might make a good movie...
an art movie...
or maybe a hollywood spectacular with some very arty aspects...
because ultimately it's about poetry...
and how those "glory bits" of sex and violence and abysmal abandon weave into the otherwise hopeless cynical drudgery along with the mysterious and the delusional stuff with or without the influence of alcoholic excess or psychedellic mediations... hahaha
yes I think I'm going to have to go through this with a basic timeline approach and then just keep reviewing that timeline as memories surface and threads might be clear enough to be followed...
and I think I'll have to review this writing style which was developed from emails but the punctuation isn't great and sentences can read wrong...
yup I need to start writing properly again...
soon...
as we are still at the beginning...
RépondreSupprimerthere are some images from hong kong...
so many in fact...
we had a view over the harbour but from my bedroom window I could see apartments further up the hill quite a way away and there would sometimes be a woman who combed her hair which was very long...
it went to the ground and maybe further...
that looked kinda spooky to me although I had the impression it was a beautiful young woman...
in the same direction but much closer there was an american girl who was ugly but kinda sexy too...
I must be about 7 years old so the girl was probably about 8...
I think she looked like an ugly child version of liza minelli...
but that was sexy...
although I'm not sure sexy is the right word...
but it probably is...
another memory is my mother taking me to a rural hut in kowloon new territories...
it was horrific...
I think I've seem images like that since in photos...
it was a peasant woman with a child deformed in a tortured expressionistic grimace...
like somebody whose handicap was to be frozen in a constant condition of total horror...
one day I heard that there had been a murder in our apartment block and that apparently the domestic had been rolled up in a carpet and thrown to her death...
I somehow must have watched police stuff on tv and went down to investigate...
the police were hosing down the tarmac and there was still a trace of pink in the water and I puked...
another time I was walking to school and I saw a big lizard in a tree on the path by the peak tramway...
and on the way back it was on the ground dead...
this is already into random rambling but I'll carry on with it...
there was a modern air conditioned supermarket that seemed like paradise to me all shiney and clean and I associated the place with dairylea cheese triangles...
it also had really cool bendy toys with sensual tactile designs...
this place along with some other luxury "mall" type places were wonderful brave new world potentials...
but of course there were lots of images of tropical squalour...
I guess an image of being at the cricket club whilst there was some kind of demonstration underlined a divided society...
a rich/poor divide that was also appeared as a racial division...
yeah in a film I'd definitely try and get as many falshbacks of a child in hong kong as possible...
the hong kong of the early sixties...
this book could be a lot more distracting than I can afford and develop into the kind of tome I detest...
I hate large books...
I read lord of the rings as a teen and resented it's lengthy pointlessness...
I always like short and/or bitty stuff like kafka's or borges or pound's cantos or kerouac's mexico city blues...
so as usual I might end up doing what I really don't want to be doing... hahaha
so I'm still right at the beginning and realising there is a lot to sift through...
RépondreSupprimera lot of glam images of hong kong like the colonial clubs and the governor's park and the peak and the ferry and the floaing restaurants...
but I need to mention where I am now along the way too...
that's just because I think I might be dying as I've been mysteriously ill for many years now...
it's a major factor in the equation...
I still desire what I never had and breeding with a nubile wife etc...
but even though I can still look ok my health and vitality are very low and my teeth won't be around long and I don't have any money so an unpleasant death could well be immanent...
so I really do want to be able to really express how awful the world is before I croak as some kind of last ditch attempt to inflate my ego...
but anyway that stuff is quite obvious...
people are strange etc...
provincial power structures make networks of prejudice and privilege and the world acts accordingly...
that is the rule...
it is the exceptions that might be more interesting...
but are there ever really any exceptions...
if you examine the facts...
I guess some outsiders make good and some insiders fuck up...
it must happen so there must be some space for things to get blurry...
but the arts do seem to repeat quite persistently along socio-eco channels...
like a bunch of silly women wearing silly hats at some garden party or other...
so yeah obviously I am sat at the computer and making some of the same old mixes etc...
RépondreSupprimerbut this year and last I managed to do some really crappy DIY on the shed/verandah thing in the yard...
I just got new guttering on the front of the house which is cool and is partially paid for by insurance money which is a first...
I haven't paid for the work yet and hopefully they won't mark it up from the estimate...
paying will hurt my account without any extras added...
I grabbed some grapes and pressed it into some grape juice last night...
it was really sweet and syruppy but felt a bit risky in terms of my GERD symptoms...
there are a few seasonal boons to living in the country but I am so slow they usually pass before I get around to grabbing some...
there are figs on the trees too and I don't seem to be grabbing any this year...
funny how lazy and distractred we can get when we are used to getting supermarket stuff...
plus the internet addiction sucks away my focus so nothing much gets done...
I don't have anything to ground me in the local reality...
no pretty girl friends or creative sympathizers or revenue sources for me here...
which is a shame...
but if I did take time to look around the countryside can be cute and there are movements and vibes I could try to tune into...
I have a camera now too if I were to get away from the computer and get observing...
I had hoped monkey would be a muse and playmate but she disappeared back to scotland...
despite a lifetime of solitude I'm definitely a co-dependent type missing his other half...
so I guess I should mention sign69 too because that is what exists already and is what this book is about...
RépondreSupprimersign69 is the work of orpheus@hell which was my online avatar from about 1998 to about 2001...
I mean I think I am still orpheus@hell but that isn't in my control and doesn't mean anything seeing as how hell died but it was quite significant to me for those 3 years and that should be the crux of the story...
anyway...
I was already a failed and bitter artist before doing digital stuff and that affected my digital perceptions...
like I wasn't at all part of an optimistic and brilliant tech youth type digital artist but rather somebody that had already wrestled with the alienation and angst idiocies of art and literature etc...
I had baggage... hahaha
and maybe because of that baggage I could have been the right guy at the right place at the right time but instead things happened all wrong like the flipside of the coin...
I guess the whole story will be a bit of a flipside tale of woe... hahaha
but I ran parallel to the glam stuff and my face and work was occasionally (unofficially) around in snapshots of the age I inhabited... hahaha
so anyway sign69 was my random eclectic thing right from the off because I was into "cantos" and borgesian fictions etc...
I did interactive stuff and was supposed to be an interface designer but anything is an interface and ultimately interactivity is pointless so I just made random interfaces that lead to nothing but other random interfaces and let the ghosts in the machine take care of interactivity...
this was a consequence of marginalisation too I guess...
if you have a job then you can make a real interface with real interactivity and sometimes that was the case...
but mostly I didn't have a sniff of any paid work or any associative project so I'd just repeat the habits of failure as if I'd invented an art form and it certainly felt that way as I watched various artists appearing to get some acclaim for an aspect of my work that I felt I'd done already and the world had systematically ignored etc... hahaha
so yeah...
anyway sign69 started in the days of very low bandwidth so it was about maximised artsy effect from minimal materials...
I guess I'd already made the point and repeated it endlessly before 9/11 and I was expecting recognition and a pay off...
which of course never happened...
9/11 happened and bad went to worse and what happened I will write up later but the worm showed up and I got stuck out here in the rural midwest of backwater with nowhere to go and ended up remaking sign69 for a higher level of bandwidth just to kill time as I died of having nowhere to go and no money to pay the fare...
so I just kept doing the same thing but a bit more abritrary and pop eclectic without the feeling I need to input so much creativity or invention as before...
like a method actor meandering through the twilight zones of media streams visiting the heads of the great unwashed - as the prince of darkness used to call them...
the world of the internet and the "real" world too became some kind of psychoanalytical visit to hell...
so I was "really" living out some kind of poetic myth as orpheus@hell...
it became the real deal and somewhere in the chaotic bits floating around consciousness or god or something had to appear... hahaha
So that's what this is supposed to be about.
RépondreSupprimerThe issues of being and creating and getting very lost because neither seem to connect to anything.
Like nothing is ever real.
Like this dream I had as a kiddy where I was so sure this toy I had dreamed into being existed that I reached out and grabbed it knowing it would be tangible but it wasn't.
Or maybe it's nothing like that at all.
Orpheus is an intriguing mythical character that enters hell in a quest to regain lost love but ultimately fails. That is probably quite a good analogy for life. I don't know where it came from but "the disappearing bride" was always a theme. The absence of half the equation.
So anyway the non-plot is lost and I'm rambling badly.
orpheus@hell was for real in that it was my real email because hell invited me and offered me an email of my choosing and that is what I chose.
I was a bit poetic and literary and had read stuff about myths so it seemed a natural choice. Of course what I didn't realise was that we live with our choices and our mistakes have consequences. That is a problem for artists and everybody else too I guess.
I mean you have to leave the ground to fly but that's also how you fall.
Icarus.
So yeah myths.
And hell and the internet...
It's all a kind of analogy of consciousness.
And even though life was crap and the weak flesh was rotting on the bone - is rotting on the bone - the events of the world seemed quite grandiose and tragic.
9/11 felt like a big millenial signal that declared this world a hell and as if it might offer an insight the internet became a window for the soul.
I cam up with the formula
spam = maps
like the crap was what defined humanity etc...
I guess from time to time I'd always had a taste for abandonment like just randomly clicking shots with cameras or swinging videos around or spilling ink etc.
But now I regret it.
You don't build a cathedral by messing around at the landfill but somehow I often can't tell the difference.
Maybe there isn't any difference.
Cathedrals are impressive because they are big and required lots of doing and managing of doing. But however much devotion can be contrived to fill out the various shrines isn't it just another arrangement of crap?
Like why am I worried about my artless rambling as I write my "book" when the book is supposed to be about how maybe the old lady tramp with a shopping trolley full of old newspapers is equivalent to the bibliotheque nationale except probably more cool somehow.
It's just the internet.
So who gets to say what is worth more?
Who defines values?
There is dum shit that gets a billion hits and brilliant epic works that get a billion hits.
RépondreSupprimerThere is stuff that is mainstream sanctioned and there is stuff that isn't.
A gazillion people out there and nobody to talk to. Nobody understands. The people who understand eachother are the nasty morons.
They know who they are and they can take sides and build value.
What can I do?
I could draw and paint a bit and then I could design a bit and put stuff together a bit and chop it up and shuffle it around whilst waiting for something to put together.
So why am I rambling?
The internet is important. It seemed to be significant. The timing of it and me converging as if it meant something.
Happening like a pit for me to fall into.
Looking for an opportunity or an explanation.
Looking for love?
Looking for my dead bride?
The ghost in the machine?
The way things are going I'll be dead soon enough.
But I've been saying that for years now.
I've been sick and hopeless for years now without even welfare but I am still lingering and malingering.
Part of me still wants to resurrect the lost bride.
Part of me wants to complain loudly enough to be heard by posterity.
So my mess might be tidied up and given value.
So yeah orpheus@hell and the lost soul looking for meaning in the mirror of the world/media/internet.
Stuck in an interstitial "chapel perilous" between matrix and the da vinci code and whatever other nonsense floats to the surface.
Les chemins de st jacques...
All roads lead to rome...
How far down the pussy hole can you go/fall when you've smoked your little smoke and nibbled on your little mushrooms...?
It's a sunny day and I should try and go for a walk. I managed to drag myself away from the computer yesterday and did the usual tour of the hill. I took a supermarket plastic bag with me and grabbed a couple of bunches of grapes and then some walnuts and then some rape leaves.
RépondreSupprimerWhilst I was at the first walnut tree a pretty blonde girl jogged by. She said hello but it wasn't a very friendly acknowledgement. I'm impressed that anybody could jog up that hill as I got worn out just ambling up it. Anyway I must look weird these days what with being toothless and overweight plus I was wearing a beige raincoat on what was a warm dry evening.
I visited the cows in the grove on the way round and fed one of them some of the rape leaves. They seemed nervous. I was a bit nervous of getting my hand sucked up by the cow's rasping tongue. On the end of the tour there are two walnut trees and they were quite laden as it's still quite early and I managed to grab quite a lot. I am always disappointed by how many are rotten and full of worms and bugs etc and I guess I should learn only to pick the best. I guess there have been quite a lot of barren years so I grab what I can when I can be bothered to do any foraging. I am quite shy about it too as I'm never sure how the farmer folk might respond if they show up. It's hunting season too of course so there is always the sound of gunfire. I am really not much of a country type and it is weird to be stuck out here all alone and especially in such poor health. I guess if I were stronger I'd be more productive and sociable and if I were productive and sociable then I wouldn't be stuck out here wasting what's left of life on the internet. And then of course I wouldn't be orpheus@hell... hahaha
When I was at the last walnut tree. Arguably the biggest and best of the ones here. A little dog started yapping at me and coming towards me across the field. It was too small to be scarey but I wondered if it might be a farmers terrier type thing. It turned out to be the dog of the english woman with the big house and she was with her young son on his bicycle. I shrugged my shoulders in a comical way as to express incomprehension at the doggy madness and I think that mime got the same thing back in response.
an uberbabe appeared today and it looks like she might be moving into my alley where junky and her BF moved out from to their new mansion down the road...
RépondreSupprimerI went out to grab more walnuts and she was skipping across the field next to my house looking like a bright ray of joy like a doe from the song of songs with her dum but friendly looking dalmatian running around her...
so if an uberbabe moves into the alley...
that means that an uberbabes BF will be with her...
and she won't be seducing me with a view to looking after me and having my babies etc...
but who knows the secret of the black magic box...
http://www.sign69.com/medialounge/thing1.html
RépondreSupprimerthis random mix of fashion models and irate arabs was done just after 9/11 when most of the world was still in shock...
I was living in the arab ghetto but working in designer expat chic zone paris...
fucked off by both worlds and not really a part of either...
but very attracted to the girls my boss had dripping off him and feeling hard done by that nothing but digital slavery and alienation was in it for me...
the radiohead song was added much later when I got myself stuck out here...
I was freaked out and obsessing over an italian babe...
and I ended up toking with the worm feeding me collages and pop songs that I would mix with whatever came up...
I ended up remixing sign69 with worm pop after it was supposed to have finished as a low bandwidth piece of net.art posterity...
I was expecting death and it was really like anything goes and felt really magically significant like I was fighting the madness the world became...
I'd been looking endlessly at horoscopes and tarot readings and saw messages hidden in spam in a quasi psychotic enlightenment mode...
that was the phase when the worm was like my online wife as my real life got worse and worse...
then she disappeared as she does - after insisting on more attention - and I took the same habit into some very silly pop zones to fill the gap she left...
witchcraft and new age and religious stuff and I chased it all down to learn of the source of her kitsch...
on some levels the silliest stuff can make sense...
like heavy metal t-shirts I guess... hahaha
but it is also quite sad and very uncool too...
but I've gone from wanting to be a hippy to being very down on spirituality for a while...
it seems like a lot of them spiritual types are just rednecks who think they're jesus because they've done drugs... hahaha
I think it's something like bukowski disgusted me for a while so I wanted to be a hippy...
but then after some hippy vibes I needed a dose of bukowski...
but I've not been doing pot or booze for a few years...
so I'm in a no mans land... hahaha
hopefully another phase will kick in eventually...
I usually almost break even when the democrats have been in for a while...
just before a bush gets elected again and the wars start up and I crash again to way below breaking even...
it's probably delusional but that's how it looked when I got some distance...
and as for delusions...
with very little happening I definitely was tuning into some weird vibes whilst I was stoning and shrooming and sick etc...
the hell reference went crazy for a while especially in turin which is supposed to be part of some weird triangle...
and I was staying in a room of an old palace that had mirrors all around it framed with lots of serpentine carving...
things were getting curiouser and curiouser for a few years back then...
various religious strands through churches and ancient weirdnesses in france etc...
the grail myths type stuff etc...
it was all floating around like crazy for a while in the pagan matrix twilight zone of occult associations... hahaha
there are a lot of wonderfully kitsch things happening in the name of spirituality... hahaha
so the vehicle for my shite experience of everything should be a movie about a rich beautiful film maker doing a documentary about me the dying destitute loser artist...
RépondreSupprimerthat allows me to rant and whine and reiterate key anecdotes of how utterly fucked up the world is whilst examining the futility of my work and situation etc...
then the girl gets pregnant by me and discusses the abortion with her rich handsome husband etc...